By Hollis Wormsby, Jr.
“The calm, cool face of the river, offered me a kiss.” My opening sentence is actually a short poem called “Suicide Note” that was written by noted author and poet, Langston Hughes. I have thought about this poem a lot as I have read stories about recent celebrity suicides and experienced my own battles with depression. I have always felt as if the poem was Langston Hughes’ way of saying simply that life had gotten overwhelming and the river came across as a relief.
Most of us have or will experience depression in our lifetime, though hopefully few of us will actually experience suicide, so I thought this week I would take a few moments to share what I have learned about accepting that you personally may be experiencing in depression as well as ways that I think you get past depression.
I think the kind of depression that leads to taking one’s own life is a product of feeling that life no longer has value. There can be a number of reasons one can feel this way. One could have experienced some life failure such as a death of a loved one, or losing a job that meant a lot to you. One might have experienced the heartbreak of divorce, including the form of divorce where your children walk away wanting next to nothing to do with you, and with the false impression you have done nothing for them. You could be someone facing the consequences of their actions for the first time and simply do not know how to handle hardship.
Depression makes you vulnerable and there will frequently be those who will use your depression to even further lower your self-esteem. It is a time when those who do not mean you well will try to define you to their benefit. This is where you have to reach into your own soul and remind yourself who you are. When folks are trying to manipulate you through your depression the first thing they will try to do is convince you, you are nothing and you don’t deserve any better. The only way to survive this is for you to know who you are and not to be subject long term to someone else’s manipulative opinion.
When you feel depression edging into your life resist the temptation to go try and hide behind a wall somewhere, that leaves you more vulnerable to being able to be manipulated. When you feel depression setting in get out of the setting that is troubling you. Go talk to your real friends, do some of the things you used to enjoy but have given up on because of the depression.
There is an old play called “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller that kind of addresses the issue. The protagonist in this play is a character named Willie Loman, who used to be the top salesman at the company he still works for. For most of his career his current boss’s father ran the company and showed him great respect, but once the son took over he had no respect for Willie Loman and constantly tried to make him feel like a has been, who was no more than a drain on the company at this point. The young boss’ negative banter had a debilitating effect on Loman, who eventually kills himself. There were other characters in the play who had also known Loman for a lifetime and wanted to give him the respect that came with all that he had accomplished, but the only place that he was willing to accept respect was from the son of the former owner, which was the one place he was never going to get it.
Depression is not always a result of the relationships in your life, but my guess is that, that would be the case in over 95 percent of the cases. It is important to remember when you are struggling to make sure you don’t reduce your world to the size of your problem. Make sure you engage in a wide range of friendships and human engagement activities and do not disproportionately engage the opinion or the onslaught of one person. Making another feel like nothing is a frequent strategy of the weak to make themselves feel stronger. Letting someone encourage you to isolate yourself with feelings of failure is the victory some in this situation are looking for. Get out and see your whole world. Be reminded of the people who still love and respect you and go out and do some of the things you still love. The best way to defeat someone who is trying to destroy you is not to engage in confrontation with them, it is to declare them through your actions, so irrelevant that you might just as well go ahead and find your joy outside them. Then you can walk away and enjoy the look of confusion on their face. Or at least that’s the way I see it.
(Hollis Wormsby has served as a featured columnist for the Birmingham Times for more than 29 years. He is the former host of Talkback on 98.7 KISS FM and of Real Talk on WAGG AM. If you would like to comment on this column you can email him at hjwormsby@aol.com)
